Standards marching on

With the launch of the iPad one of the striking things to me is its reliance on web standards. Apple’s own Technical Note on preparing websites for the iPad specifically states web developers should be using web standards for audio and video, specifically the HTML5 video and audio tags. If a large corporation like Apple is basically forcing web developers to use standards-based techniques to deliver content like video, chances are people will listen.

In this day and age you’d think standards was the assumed approach for all web agencies. From my experience, hardly so. Only last week I encountered two appalling coded sites via potential clients. One using tables for layout with no meaningful ALT text for images, the other a single image in a page with no text behind it (a 100% wide image too, which technically would work on an iPhone or iPad but be pretty much unreadable to everyone!). Both of which were from companies who claim to build websites as part of their professional services.

After following tweets from what sounded like an excellent An Event Apart, I heard about Eric Meyer’s talk on using media queries to deliver specific CSS depending on the device width or orientation. This means it’s possible to create flexible layouts for desktop and mobile simply with CSS (i.e. switching between a three column layout for desktop and a one column for mobile). Another great reason for using standards when developing for mobile or the iPad.